Internet-of-things, IoT, a term that encompasses machine-type communication, MTC, communication and large chunks of cloud services, as well as personal technology such as wearables, smart homes, and mobile phones, is a subject for which the interest and common awareness has exploded in recent years. There are several examples of working applications and devices, particularly in the MTC segment, now being deployed. The benefits of an electricity or water metering device reporting readings directly to the operator, rather than requiring a visit by a meter maid, is obvious. As more and more “things” become connected there is an opportunity to build appliances that involves several of these things in constellations that perhaps was not even envisioned when they were bought as individual devices.
Typically, there are several stakeholders in an IoT/Cloud application, such as a device manufacturer, one or more parties owning IP related to device functionality, device owners, cloud service provider(s), transport providers (telecom operator, ISP, etc.), application developers and end users.
In existing solutions, a device manufacturer typically licenses functionality from IP owners before selling the device. End users pay for devices, either in full, or via subscription contracts running over a period of time. The transport necessary for communication within an application is usually handled by a separate subscription to a separate party, such as a telecom operator. The application is then purchased or, again, subscribed to, by the end user. Should the end user decide to stop using the application, there are several subscriptions to cancel, with several different parties, and some of those may be difficult (or impossible) to cancel before a set period of time.
The software industry is moving towards subscription and pay-per-use models, rather than up-front payment for software and services. These models have successfully been applied to cloud services, but it is less clear how to apply pay-per-use strategies to the emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) market which is expected to have a value of between $1.9 trillion and $7.1 trillion by 2020 according to Gartner and IDC, respectively.
A major problem with the existing solutions is a ‘stovepipe-like’ design where all devices connect to cloud services, either directly or via a gateway device.
As an example, an end user typically must pay in full for a new device, pay for an application to run on the device, sign up for a cloud service subscription, and pay an operator a monthly fee for data traffic between the device and the cloud service.
In a system that consists of components from various vendors, it is technically challenging to measure how much “use” each application actually gets. It requires careful planning and system integration when designing the appliance. Adding new components afterwards, or allowing individual components to take part in multiple separate appliances, will increase the complexity of metering even further. In practice, it becomes so difficult that it is not being done at all.
Consequences of the current approach includes vendor lock-in effects, little room for innovation on top of the solutions, stale applications (because one-off solutions are expensive to maintain and develop further), and unclear role separation between operators, device vendors, service providers, application developers and end users.
Hence, there is a need for improved methods of metering operation of applications, suitable for applications in distributed systems.